Problem Definition

Demand for mental health services among youth has increased dramatically in recent years, but people still do not have access to professional help. While the budget for mental health services has increased across Canadian universities, it can often take months to get a consultation.

Product Goal

For Hack the 6ix 2017, my team wanted to create a web application that helps mental health professionals streamline their process. The goal for MyndJournal is to collect daily journaling data from patients, and use it to help healthcare providers understand their current headspace. While the journal’s specific contents would remain private to the patient, our web app would use sentiment analysis to create an overview of how their patient is doing at the moment. This would help be more efficient with their time and care efforts, and hopefully allow them to take on more patients.

Conclusion

My team built an application that allows patients to express their daily emotions to their healthcare provider without them needing to read it. We used the IBM Watson natural language understanding API to analyze the tone of each journal entry and created a representation of the patient's mindset through charts and graphs. Our team was named one of 4 finalists for the hackathon and demoed our project on stage for the rest of the Hack the 6ix participants.